Meet Hotline – our new in-app customer engagement platform

I’m delighted and super excited to bring you Hotline, our new in-app customer engagement platform, and the third product to come out of the Freshdesk stable.

Last October, a few weeks before we announced our acquisition of Konotor, I remember having a chat with Sri (the CEO of Konotor) about why it made sense for both of our companies to work together. The Konotor team had the right kind of expertise building a mobile engagement product. Couple that with Freshdesk’s background in SaaS, and we could help them take it to the next level. And right from day one, we knew exactly what we wanted to do – build a product for today’s mobile-first companies, and do it better than anyone else.

Today, we are excited to show you what we had in mind, and unveil a product that directly solves the unique challenges faced by mobile apps.

Support needs to be inside your app

If your business runs on mobile, every interaction your customers have with you is on your app. They decide what to buy on your app, they pay for it on your app and they even check its status on your app. Then why is it that when it comes to support, they have to switch to email to talk to someone? Hotline comes into play here by letting you make their experience smooth by letting you talk to them where they are. And it makes it easy for you to do it by offering everything you need – in-app chat, proactive engagement, FAQs, and more – in one SDK.

Context needs to be readily available

For most mobile commerce businesses, 80% of support conversations are about the current transaction with the customer – the groceries they’re getting delivered, the steak on its way from a restaurant, the cab ride across town. With these kind of requests, you need to act before the completion of your service to retain the customer. Hotline pulls all the information you need to know from your systems so that you can stop searching and be nimble with your responses every single time.

Support 10x more customers

Your business can boom and grow 100x in a few months, but your support team just can’t scale at the same pace. So it’s important that you use a fast, low friction and lightweight medium to get in touch with customers – something that’s not just good for them but also for your business.

Hotline’s UI is optimized for fast-switching and quick answers across conversations. Features like custom channels, automated replies, bulk actions, canned responses, shortcodes and more, make sure that no matter how big your support load gets, your existing team will still be able to step up and hold the fort together.

Proactive engagement

Finally, Hotline helps you drive adoption and business by letting you create visually rich marketing campaigns, and send them to the right user at the right time. Whether it’s regular push notifications, interactive messages, segment based targeting or APIs, we have what you need to talk to your customers in real-time proactively.

The launch of Hotline marks an important step for us as a company. Not just because it’s the launch of a new product, but also because it marks the successful integration of Konotor with our existing mobile SDK, Mobihelp. So, it’s not just the best of two products but the best of two teams, playing to their strengths, to get this shipped out of the door as quickly as possible.

What this means to our existing customers

Of course, all of this is great news to people who’ve been using either Konotor or Mobihelp. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be reaching out to you to help you transition to our new product.

Hotline is, of course, integrated with Freshdesk out of the box so you can continue to use both products together even after you make the migration. For any questions, please reach out to support@hotline.io and we’ll help you out.